His University Asked Him to Build an Emoji-Themed Parade Float. Then It Fired Him.

Jack Sheffler had never built a parade float.

It would be a pain. There would be trips to another town for materials, followed by the strapping down of wires and the stringing up of lights. And he’d have to do it all in the afternoons or on the weekends — when he wasn’t on the job as chairman of the fine-arts department at Concord University, a public institution in West Virginia.

But his university wanted him to do it. In fact, a dean told him it was important to Concord’s president, Kendra Boggess, that it be done. So Sheffler, who had just been promoted to full professor, got it done.

He hashed out what the float would look like with a staff member of the local hospital, which was sponsoring the float. Sheffler said he had wanted the float to feature Minions, the Twinkie-esque creatures from the children’s movie series Despicable Me, but the hospital said no. It would be emoji.

The hospital cut Sheffler a check for $4,250 and sent him on his way. Sheffler, along with some students, had the float finished in time for the November 27 holiday parade. The emoji’s grinning yellow faces beamed atop metal poles — looking like lollipops — as the float cruised down the street. Sheffler was aboard, making sure no one tripped over any wiring. Children on the float tossed candy to the citizens of a small town in West Virginia while Christmas tunes played.

About two months later, the police escorted Sheffler off Concord’s campus. He’d been fired.

The decision to terminate Sheffler had everything to do with the emoji-filled float, and it has heightened paranoia among faculty members on the campus. Several professors who spoke to The Chronicle about the case insisted on anonymity, citing fears that they could be fired for speaking out. (A university spokeswoman told The Chronicle that administrators, including Boggess, would not comment on the rationale for the firing because Sheffler is protesting the decision.)

The professors see Sheffler’s firing, and the recent adoption of new policies that allow the board and the president more power to fire faculty members, as broadside attacks on tenure.

David Hill, an associate professor of mathematics, considers the situation at Concord so dire that he led a no-confidence vote against the president. He has been at the university since 1991, and his father taught physics there for nearly 50 years. He is unequivocal about what he sees as the danger of the new policies. “It’s very chilling to free speech,” Hill said. “It’s trying to erase tenure. It’ll make it very hard to hire.”

‘They Can’t Rent Me Out’

For years, the Princeton-Mercer County Chamber of Commerce has hosted a Christmas Parade on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Robert Farley, a former head of the chamber, said the spectacle usually draws thousands. The kids love it, he said, Santa Claus especially. And it’s one of those traditions that is such a part of the community, he can’t recall when it started.

The Princeton Community Hospital has been a mainstay of the parade. In 2016 it even won an award for its float. According to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that first reported on the controversy over Sheffler’s firing, the hospital typically pays artists to make its floats. But while the hospital knew about the parade, the person who would be building its 2017 float, Sheffler, was a novice. “I didn’t get my master’s degree in float building,” he said.

Sheffler, who had been at the university since 2002, usually worked in acrylics and maybe the occasional print, but he reckoned he could figure out the float.

What followed was a lot of trial and error. Sheffler initially planned to use plywood for the emoji but quickly found that was too heavy. So he tried to print them on paper, with a waterproof veneer to make them rain-resistant. But the ink ran. Then he had to buy a generator.

Eventually, the 55-year-old professor found the right combination. He printed the faces on a plastic canvaslike material, and attached them to drywall, which was lighter than the plywood he had tried earlier. The result? Four-foot-by-four-foot grinning yellow balls. One looked like Elvis; another wore reindeer antlers while blowing a kiss.

On its debut the float meandered down the streets of Princeton, W.Va., along with a small horse, classic cars, and marching bands.

In some photographs online, you can see Sheffler on the float. The hospital even kept four of the emoji for future use. (Sheffler has the others.)

But somebody wasn’t happy with the float. An unnamed person at the hospital called the university on December 5, 2017, to “report dissatisfaction with the float,” according to Sheffler’s termination letter. And the hospital now wanted whatever money was left over from the project to be given to the university. That’s where the trouble started for Sheffler because he couldn’t say if there was any left.

Sheffler thought he was working directly for the hospital, not the university, though he did pay a few students to help. (To back up that claim, Sheffler said the hospital had later sent him tax forms documenting his pay for the work.)

The university’s termination letter tells a different story. According to it, Boggess “orally contracted” with the hospital staff for the university to build the float, and the provost delegated the task to Sheffler. The work was “on behalf of the university,” the letter says.

So when the hospital came calling and Sheffler said he didn’t have records, administrators considered that theft. Making matters worse for Sheffler, he also had no receipts. (According to the termination letter, Sheffler first told officials he had kept receipts, but later said he hadn’t.) Several people who know Sheffler told The Chronicle that while they consider him a good teacher, he is not good at keeping records and performing such administrative tasks.

Sheffler’s mind, he said, wasn’t on receipts. He had been busy, both teaching classes and running the department. He had to build the float, and, on top of that, he said he was going through a divorce. His then wife had just moved to New Mexico. “And so I had this on my plate,” he said. “Plus teaching is always, you know, it’s exhausting like any job. But, I mean, that’s where your mind is. So I didn’t keep everything, and all the receipts, and so on.”

According to letters that led up to Sheffler’s termination, the university was willing to make a deal with him: Pay the university $3,000, and provide receipts from the project. The university even moved back the deadline to allow Sheffler more time to comply.

But Sheffler held firm. He wouldn’t pay the $3,000, which he saw as extortion. He was taking what he saw as a moral stand.

“They can’t rent me out,” he said. “I’m a little too long in my career. I worked hard for my tenure, and I worked very hard for my rank, full professor. I am prideful in that way. I am not a freshman employee who can be pushed around.”

‘Ripped Away’

So Concord wasn’t getting money from Sheffler. In February he was fired. “Your conduct is considered insubordination in addition to fraudulently obtaining and misappropriating university funds,” the termination letter says. “The university cannot and will not accept such behavior.”

Police officers ushered him off the campus. He was allowed to return only to take a yoga class and to collect personal belongings from the art department. Dismissal also meant he was no longer allowed to live in the four-bedroom house on campus where he had raised his children.

He has since bought a repossessed home, in the nearby town of Bluefield, that previously belonged to a pet hoarder. He’s ripped up many of the floors, though plenty of plumbing and electric work remains.

Students, faculty members, and alumni were outraged at Sheffler’s termination, especially those he had served as an adviser. A couple of his former students launched a Facebook group, “Let’s Help Jack Sheffler,” which has about 260 members. Every week or so, someone will post a question seeking an update on Sheffler’s situation, and the answer is usually the same: Another hearing is pending.

But in the days and weeks after he was fired, the group organized an email campaign, protesting to the institution’s Board of Governors, and swapped fond memories of their time with Sheffler. A student who said she had studied with Sheffler wrote about the experience of losing her adviser in the middle of a semester.

“Jack was ripped away from me at the most crucial part of my college career,” she wrote.

Sheffler told The Chronicle it was difficult for him to read the posts. Not because he felt he had done anything wrong, he said, but because he feels bad for what his students lost. As part of his courses, he would take them on field trips to places like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, in southwestern Pennsylvania, the Mint Museum, in Charlotte, N.C., and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. He had made a promise, and now he couldn’t deliver.

Sheffler is contesting the university’s decision. His next hearing with West Virginia’s Public Employees Grievance Board is scheduled for September, which means he’ll miss at least a part, if not all, of the fall semester.

‘Loser’

Concord faculty members, like their peers at other institutions, have plenty to worry about. Charles Brichford, a professor who retired from the university this past spring, said the faculty was already at odds with the administration, but the firing of Sheffler provoked a different response.

“It was more disbelief than outrage,” he said.

Faculty members questioned why Sheffler had been dismissed in the middle of the semester, Brichford said. If the university wanted to recover the money, why not wait to fire Sheffler until the summer, when classes would be over? There was a sense, he said, that if the administration could fire Sheffler, anyone could be next.

The firing fueled broader discontent at the institution, which like other public colleges in West Virginia has suffered as state support for higher education has fallen by 14.5 percent in the last five years, the second-biggest drop in the country.

When The Wall Street Journal in February compiled a ranking of “winners” and “losers” in higher education, Concord was chosen as the standard-bearer for a “loser.” Among the reasons for the designation, its freshman enrollment had dropped nearly 20 percent in five years, and it had burned through millions of dollars in reserves.

An independent report requested by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission suggested that Concord be merged with nearby Bluefield State College because the challenges for both institutions “are so serious that only a major restructuring will preserve postsecondary-education opportunity for students in southern West Virginia,” according to WVNews.com.

Some of the faculty’s attitude toward the administration is colored by how it handled past crises. In October 2017 a wastewater pipe backed up and sewage spilled into Marsh Hall, according to a faculty memo obtained by The Chronicle. The unpleasant scene featured a fetid odor and people getting sick. The administration, the memo says, failed to let faculty members know what would be done about the situation. Nearly a week later, professors pressed the provost on accommodations for those who had been displaced by the flooding. His response?

“I guess if faculty want the job done faster, we could hand them shovels, and they could start digging,” he said, according to the memo, which circulated widely on the campus. More than a year later, several faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle mentioned that incident as evidence of the administration’s combative attitude toward the faculty.

‘A Slap in the Face’

Faculty members acted on their discontent. They had voted no confidence in the provost, Peter L. Viscusi, in 2016. And in April they expressed no confidence in Boggess, the president, as well.

Then, in May, the board approved policies that trumped many professors’ previous complaints: It effectively neutered, they said, the benefits of tenure while making it easier to lay off professors. The new directives passed the Board of Governors with little dissent, according to the meeting’s minutes.

Only Sally Howard, a professor of political science and the board’s faculty representative, suggested changes in the policies that could offer faculty protections, such as calling for terminal contracts. Such contracts protect faculty members who, if fired in the middle of the school year, find themselves in a job hunt. She also suggested that the board remove the word “attitude” as a reason a faculty member could be dismissed because “it was too vague.” But most of her ideas weren’t even considered. (Her proposal that the university allow professors to maintain digital portfolios of their work, for purposes of promotion, rather than in three-ring binders was accepted.)

Michael Harris, an associate professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University who studies tenure, said the policies, which he reviewed at The Chronicle’s request, undermine the traditional faculty power to make academic decisions.

Harris, the author of a forthcoming book on tenure, said the policies repeatedly emphasize the president and the administration as the final decision makers. And they often grant a limited role to the faculty in matters of firing or of downsizing departments. He said it would be easy for the president to take advantage of such broad language and it seemed unneeded.

“Everyone knows the board has final authority,” he said. “Everyone knows the president makes recommendations to a board. That’s true of virtually every board in the country. This feels much more like a slap in the face to the faculty, which is unnecessary.”

One passage of the new policies stood out to him. It concerns the timeline for when and how professors earn tenure. Among the considerations for granting tenure are many concerns about the university’s “projected enrollment patterns, staffing needs of the institution, current and projected mission of each college or department, specific academic competence of the faculty members, and preservation of opportunities for infusion of new talent.”

Concerns about staffing levels and need are worthy, Harris said, but they should be considered before even hiring for a tenure-track position in the first place.

Greg Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, said the policy on faculty dismissal appears to consolidate the power of firing to the president and the governing board while removing professors from the equation almost entirely. A passage about “faculty reductions in force,” he said, would allow the board “the sole discretion” to broadly define when the situation was serious enough to fire faculty members.

Much of the language, Scholtz said, amounts to an embrace of “anything goes.”

“If I am reading this policy correctly, it places all faculty members in a severely insecure position and could render tenure essentially meaningless,” he said. “As a result, academic freedom is seriously compromised. If I were a faculty member at Concord University, I would be extremely concerned.”

When asked how Concord’s policies compare with those of other institutions, he wrote, “I have seen very few as deficient as Concord’s.”

Concord is just one small university, but Harris said it might be tenure’s canary in the coal mine. Lacking prestige and predictable funding, and with its faculty lacking easy mobility to other institutions, Concord has turned inward.

When colleges have been continually buffeted by outside forces, “one of the few things they have to control is their faculty policies and faculty-hiring decisions, and that’s what people have started to turn to,” Harris said. “Now the question is, do we start neutering our existing tenure policies to give even more flexibility to administrative decision making?”

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.